In the Land of the Brave a worrying
state anomaly is quietly being exposed. It appears that for some time, certainly
for most of the last century, there has been a bizarre scheme of allocating
female names to male births for secret State records. One of their most famous
outlaws was Jessie James - outed when he turned bad; another accidental expose
was that most famous of macho citizens John Wayne whose given name was Marion.
Rumour has it that a form of chromosome, or nowadays DNA, testing is used to
establish the required severity of a names effeminacy. With few exceptions the
subject is encouraged to adopt a more traditional name and the alias is kept
in reserve as additional humiliation for anyone caught behaving in a criminally
antisocial manner.

Bizarre as this scheme may sound,
further proof is found in two of this week's current news stories. The first
is a man called Tracy. He spent sixteen years on death row for a psychotic murder
before being killed a few days ago. The second is a man named Jo Anne, convicted
of killing a fellow prisoner on the now rescinded evidence of three other inmates.

And how we laughed when Johnny Cash,
a pal of the Duke, tried to expose the practice by singing about 'A Boy Named
Sue'. We owe the man an apology.